Software Cinema - Video-based Requirements Engineering

Introduction

Software Cinema is research in useful applications of digital video in software development. However, digital video alone is an inert medium which does not facilitate changing the message of finished movies. To alleviate this shortcoming, we propose a tool kit to create, edit, and modify digital media consisting of film enriched with software models. We call this Requirements Analysis Video (RAV).Our focus in the development life cycle is on requirements elicitation and analysis, since we expect the greatest benefits there, especially in the application domain of mobile interactive users. The rhetoric gap between end-users and developers is especially severe in those applications, and we are confident that RAV can serve to reduce misconceptions and misunderstandings. We think RAV is a viable alternative for capturing and transporting fuzzy information. Moreover, the tool kit could prove beneficial for creators of other kinds of interactive media.

Xrave

Xrave is part of the tool kit and developed solely for the purpose of supporting the Software Cinema technique. It is a tool to generate, modify, and present Requirements Analysis Videos (RAV). RAVs consist of UML diagrams (or extensions thereof) and video footage. These two elements can be linked on a fine-grained level of detail to facilitate the validation of software models by end-users, who only need to understand the video. To give a glimpse of Xrave, we provided some screenshots: